After 3 months of concern of being followed, my brother Howard went missing. It was October 20th 1989 and my brother was out on a hike with his girlfriend in the Uintah mountains in Utah. I was at home, asleep.

My mother came in around 7:30 asking me if I had seen my brother at all since the night before when he left, my response was no. After a 10 minute conversation about how she thinks his car needed new tires before he drove up mountains to go hiking, my mother said she was going to go back to bed and that he had probably just slept in at his girlfriends house or maybe was at another of his close friends houses. Howard was really

shy, and introverted, so he practically never did anything with people besides us and his girlfriend, who was also very introverted herself.

By 9am my mom had started freaking out, asking things like, “what if he crashed his car because of the damn old tires” and, “What if he fell” but nothing quite stuck to me like the last question my mom had asked me, “What if he was murdered”.

That word. Murdered. That hit where it hurts, just for my brother to be taken from so easily in the case of murder, taken as if he was just a pile of sand in the beach that one day had to be dug up to build a new beach house.

That word. Murdered. What if? what if he really was murdered, what if someone cared so little about themselves that they would burden someone else by taking what meant so little to them in the first place.

That word. Murdered. How could it be that someone could even hate my brother that bad, how could it be?

It was now 2:30pm, exactly 24 hours from the last time he was seen, my mom could now file a missing persons report. This missing persons report was the last little bit of hope my mom had in the last little while, I mean she lost her job just 2 months earlier, her father, killed in a tragic work accident, her mother now widowed and alone. This was the last thing straw for my mother and her smoking, she smoked while my and my brother were little kids, but she never smoked around us kids. Even after all the recent stress she said that she would not pickup another cigarette because she couldn’t stand to see all of the elders sick with their lung cancers. But this, this was the last thing holding her back.

After she had finished filling out the missing persons report she went outside and started smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t at the police station so I didn’t notice that she had started smoking, but now I did because I had rode my bike from our house to the local police department and saw her outside, with a halfway smoked cigarette between her fingers, crying and shaking. This was the only time I would not say anything about her smoking, because I knew she really was under enough pressure.

I was also shaky but I thought I knew that he would fine, or at least I thought I was fine but a police officer saw me and decided to do a slight medical test on me. I’m assuming that I was probably shaking bad because they had done seizure protocol on me.

3 weeks later, there was still no sign of my brother, we had sent out search parties, searched the road he disappeared on. We only found his car, which was just as usual as normally.

2 months into the search we get a phone call from his girlfriends mother, she said that Amy had came home, but that she was in bad shape and didn’t know where Howard might be, only that they heard ruffles in the bushes next to them and she ran and never saw him again.

A large question arose, what took her so long to return home? So my family met up with her and asked her this question, she said that she had been stuck and lost in the woods and had been surviving purely off river water and her backpack full of snacks.

My brother was found 9 months later in a construction site, well, what was left of my brother.

This small story was dedicated to my family. I hope this never happens.